In recent months, I've thought a great deal about the limits of human compassion. We seem hard-wired to relate to individuals and their stories, but our compassion breaks down when we're asked to relate to groups. We can empathize with one Holocaust survivor; 6 million dead, on the other hand, are a number.
I was put in mind of another limitation on human compassion as I read D.T. Max's recent New Yorker article about David Foster Wallace. Wallace, he says, perceived "that America was at once overentertained and sad." Speaking to Salon in 1996, Wallace said that living "in America around the millennium" was "particularly sad . . . . It's [a] like a stomach-level sadness. . . . It manifests itself as a kind of lostness."
Wallace's experience of the 90's made me gape in amazement. Sad?! The 90's? The Internet boom? The swinging Clinton years? When America was good and loved and Whole Foods was becoming mainstream and salaries were rising and everyone was making money hand-over-fist in the stock market?
Of course, Wallace's 1990's included stays in mental asylums, a half-way house, a failed relationship, as well as the pre-Infinite Jest stage in his career, when he was worried that his career had ended before it'd begun. His diagnosis of the American condition during those years strikes me -- and I say this gently, cognizant of Wallace's suicide six months ago, and feeling that engagement with his ideas is a proper way to honor his memory -- as a projection of his own profound sadness onto the country writ large.
That Wallace felt the need to address the state of the nation is a reflection of his ambition, but whether he could have come to any other conclusion of the world around him -- be it his closest circle of peers or the broadest circle of the globe -- seems doubtful because of another of the limits of human compassion: the tendency to generalize about others based on ourselves.
For example, my default assumption is that most people value time efficiency; my experience, on the other hand, is that my default assumption is wrong. Nonetheless, it's difficult for me to restrain my frustration at the Beijing taxi driver who has resignedly driven me into a traffic jam instead of taking a faster detour; unless replenished through conscious effort, my compassion dwindles for people who operate on rules different from my own.
This limitation makes challenging any individual's ability to relate to another person; applied on a group level, it's even more likely to cause distortions ("All Americans want fast services"; "All Beijing taxi drivers waste time"). Wallace was, without question, aware of his pain, but the fact that he detected sadness in himself does not mean that other Americans were aware of their own conditions, sad or otherwise. Self-awarenes, in my experience, is among the least useful of characteristics to project on others if the goal is obtaining accurate deductions about them.
Of course, maybe I'm falling into my own trap; my generalizations about the limitations of human compassion could be wrong; I may be completely misconstruing the basis of Wallace's conclusions. And perhaps Wallace was right about millenial sadness in America (for example, the musical Rent makes the same point).
The question is whether nurturing such doubts is a means of transcending those limits and expanding the scope of human compassion. I am hoping the answer is yes.
I was put in mind of another limitation on human compassion as I read D.T. Max's recent New Yorker article about David Foster Wallace. Wallace, he says, perceived "that America was at once overentertained and sad." Speaking to Salon in 1996, Wallace said that living "in America around the millennium" was "particularly sad . . . . It's [a] like a stomach-level sadness. . . . It manifests itself as a kind of lostness."
Wallace's experience of the 90's made me gape in amazement. Sad?! The 90's? The Internet boom? The swinging Clinton years? When America was good and loved and Whole Foods was becoming mainstream and salaries were rising and everyone was making money hand-over-fist in the stock market?
Of course, Wallace's 1990's included stays in mental asylums, a half-way house, a failed relationship, as well as the pre-Infinite Jest stage in his career, when he was worried that his career had ended before it'd begun. His diagnosis of the American condition during those years strikes me -- and I say this gently, cognizant of Wallace's suicide six months ago, and feeling that engagement with his ideas is a proper way to honor his memory -- as a projection of his own profound sadness onto the country writ large.
That Wallace felt the need to address the state of the nation is a reflection of his ambition, but whether he could have come to any other conclusion of the world around him -- be it his closest circle of peers or the broadest circle of the globe -- seems doubtful because of another of the limits of human compassion: the tendency to generalize about others based on ourselves.
For example, my default assumption is that most people value time efficiency; my experience, on the other hand, is that my default assumption is wrong. Nonetheless, it's difficult for me to restrain my frustration at the Beijing taxi driver who has resignedly driven me into a traffic jam instead of taking a faster detour; unless replenished through conscious effort, my compassion dwindles for people who operate on rules different from my own.
This limitation makes challenging any individual's ability to relate to another person; applied on a group level, it's even more likely to cause distortions ("All Americans want fast services"; "All Beijing taxi drivers waste time"). Wallace was, without question, aware of his pain, but the fact that he detected sadness in himself does not mean that other Americans were aware of their own conditions, sad or otherwise. Self-awarenes, in my experience, is among the least useful of characteristics to project on others if the goal is obtaining accurate deductions about them.
Of course, maybe I'm falling into my own trap; my generalizations about the limitations of human compassion could be wrong; I may be completely misconstruing the basis of Wallace's conclusions. And perhaps Wallace was right about millenial sadness in America (for example, the musical Rent makes the same point).
The question is whether nurturing such doubts is a means of transcending those limits and expanding the scope of human compassion. I am hoping the answer is yes.
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